The Risks of Cold Market Recruiting

Cold Market recruiting have a lot of problems that you might have noticed - let me show you how they can be avoided and how you can succeed without them.

Offline in-person cold market recruiting has been the primary way to find prospects in the network marketing industry.

The cold market refers to people you don’t know and has never spoken to before.

The warm market is people you know, like friends and family but also acquaintances.

When starting with Network Marketing you usually start with friends and family.

But they don’t last for long – you eventually need to go into the cold market.

And what do you do then? Find cold market prospects outside or cold-call them from a list?

I was told that I would learn and that I would be more comfortable with it as the time went by.

I just didn’t understand why I should learn how to do things that felt so wrong and that I really didn't wanted to do. If I’m going to be in business for myself I want to have fun right?

Prospecting is a REAL network marketing skill

It takes time to develop.

Your conversation with the strangers you meet need to go through certain stages – you need to get somebody interested in your products, service or opportunity.

And this is to sell. Forget that your upline or company are saying “this is not selling it is sharing”. Learn the real skills needed instead of simplifying it in your mind.

It is difficult but it’s not complicated.

The conversation has to go through certain stages that resemble what a sales person does to get somebody interested in a product or service.

This is how cold marketing prospecting and recruiting works.

Over the past 10 to 15 years or so, as the Internet has become a more dominant portion of our lives, cold marketing recruiting strategies have been applied in the digital world as well.

But cold market recruiting online can go very wrong when you approach it with a selfish intent. This is true offline as well but online more people will notice…

If you have the wrong mindset it can Sabotage your business!

I’m sure that you:

have been added to groups on Facebook without being asked if you are interested

have gotten messages from strangers with links to the “best thing ever”

have a couple of friends that are practically ONLY posting about their products and opportunity on social media.

This is highly annoying behavior and some of it can get the ones doing it banned from Facebook for example. But also, they alienate everyone around them.

I mean it has happened that I’ve been fed up with posts from a person in the same network marketing company as myself. I love the products but seriously – I don’t need to see them in my newsfeed every second.

After all, when you nag people about joining an opportunity, people tend to notice and remember you… and not in a good way.

Remember, this is network marketing, and networks are made of people.

By annoying others, people doing this set themselves back months and maybe even years in the long run, by damaging influential relationships, for the sake of short term returns.

Not good!

And this is what you really want to avoid with cold market recruiting — burning bridges and ruining the relationships you have with people, especially people of influence or those whom will eventually will become influential.

Again. Network Marketing is all about relationships!

Because people don’t tend to forget when you violate their trust.

Online (and offline) Prospecting has it’s risks

Let’s talk about the difference between online vs. offline recruiting and their risks.

You actively seek people out for the purpose of introducing them to your business.

That’s how you find prospects.

And in your everyday activities, you constantly think about…

“Where can I find more prospects, people to connect to, so I can introduce them to my business?”

Cold market online prospecting is a little different, but not completely.

First, the good thing about doing it online, is that you can do it from home. No running around trying to find people to talk to and no thinking about the waiter as a prospect – enjoy your meals!

Your first option is to target people you might have a common connection with, like friends of friends on Facebook.

Yet this still carries many of the same relationship damaging risks as “real life” recruiting and prospecting.

Obviously, the first risk is that there’s always lots of rejection offline and online. (95 % will say no – and that is if you are skilled)

And the people you are targeting, (who you don’t know, but may know people you know), if you bother or upset them, you can get a bad reputation as well.

Another strategy is to target people in Social Media business groups or forums, because you know they are entrepreneurial, but this is also where you can get into trouble, you need to read the groups guidelines!

People might think you are annoying or they might ban you and report you…

Now, at this point you might be thinking…

“I really don’t want to be one of those people harassing everyone they meet about business opportunities.”

– I know I thought so and I still do.

The good news is you don’t have to!

Why I Completely Stopped Cold Market Prospecting & Recruiting

A year ago, I made the decision that I no longer wanted to do cold market prospecting, which actually ended up being the best thing I ever did – after that I’ve seen results in my business!

I will share with you what I do instead to recruit and build my business (you can get a free boot camp by clicking this link), but first I want to talk about some issues with Cold Market Prospecting.

Cold Market Prospecting often becomes Desperate

When most are doing cold market recruiting, they’re always looking for an opportunity to serve themselves– they want to recruit or sell for your organization to grow.

Instead they should be thinking about helping the person they are talking to. What does she need?

The best prospectors and builders in the world can “flip a switch” in their head to remember that they want to help the person they are talking to – not themselves.

That is a very difficult thing to do - especially if you’re broke and need results, fast!

Usually it’s not until you have results you are able to turn of the “need to recruit” switch in your head.

And until you are able to think of every person as someone YOU can help and don’t have a NEED for everyone to join or buy from you, people probably will notice your desperation and that’ll make them less eager to join.

Which leads us to the second problem

You always have an agenda.

When prospecting, every personal conversation you have with another individual, online or offline, is now about your business.

Thus, every conversation you have is not authentic.

You always have in the back of your head that you need to direct the conversation towards your business.

Is there anything wrong with that?

Well, some might say yes and some might say no.

But for me - It’s just NOT how I want to live my life.

I don’t want to have to go to a party, to a restaurant, to a friend and only think about my business and how I need to recruit and sell. I want to be social and a “normal person”

Last year I went on a vacation abroad with my mother and sister. The whole vacation I thought about that I needed to talk to people and build my team.

I had a good trip BUT I was bothered by it and I couldn’t enjoy the trip like I should have.

I didn’t wanted to live that way.

A couple of months later after totally abandoning cold market prospecting I had another vacation with my husband. For the whole trip, I didn’t think about recruiting even once and we had a great time.

You can easily be misunderstood!

If you’re targeting friends of friends in “real life”, people can start talking about you.

You might become the person that nobody wants at their parties or be around in any circumstance

You can become quite lonely.

Online it’s even worse

You don’t want influencers and leaders in the home business and network marketing niches to be annoyed with your self-serving behavior on groups and forums.

Unfortunately, this is an easy mistake to make when you’re starting out online, because most communities and their leaders are easily available to you.

You probably want them on your side, right?

Facebook hates cold market recruiting!

Right now Facebook is one of the best places online to generate leads for your business.

But it’s also heavily used for cold market recruiting right now.

And this is creating a lot of complaints.

Like I mentioned before…

People don’t like being added to groups or solicited without permission and Facebook hates that kind of behavior, too.

In fact, Facebook does NOT like people doing cold market prospecting, at all!

A lot of network marketers will go on Facebook and start doing cold market recruiting and sending private messages.

Those private messages inevitably include links to their company URL, because they’re obviously sending that link in the hopes that people will check out their ‘deal.’

And

Facebook notices these links get PM’d over and over and over again, or when they see the same links posted frequently on pages or in groups, they keep tabs on how many complaints the link receives.

Since most people will reject cold prospecting attempts, especially online, where such behavior is often viewed as spam or a scam, you will get such complaints, even if you’ve got a great website or offer.

And when this happens enough times…

Facebook will literally ban your domain if you are using cold prospecting techniques consistently and are essentially spamming people.

AND If people complain enough about you, you will have your personal account banned and shut down.

Unfortunately, this is how cold market recruiting is being taught right now, by many people.

And as you can see, it leads to a lot of problems.

So what’s the solution?

You need a strategy that works, that Facebook and other social media platforms like and that your prospects won’t see as spam.

First and foremost, though, you need to recognize that prospecting is NOT MARKETING.

The Marketing in Network Marketing is in many cases lost

Instead people are taught prospecting (sales), which is very different from marketing,

My Mentor, and the author of the Attraction Marketing Formula E-book, is sharing online business building strategies that he uses today to generate 400-500 red hot prospects per day, 30-50 new customers per day and 80-100 business builders per month WITHOUT sending a single private message and only calling someone, after they’ve expressed an interest in what he has to offer.

You don’t want to be known online as a spammer and a self-serving annoying person.

Relationships are the key to this industry!

I don’t want to say that online or offline traditional cold market recruiting doesn’t work. It sure does for a lot of people. But I’m not one of them so I am happy to have found a way that works for me!

I get to live the life I want! Work from wherever I want but not sabotaging any party by talking business 😉

And if you learn these ‘attraction marketing’ skills, trust me… people will be attracted to you and want to learn from you and will join you as a result.